The Dark Themes Of Film Noir, And Why They Matter Today

In the 1940s and 1950s, a new genre of film began to filter out of Hollywood. It was a hard-bitten, cynical genre, dealing with themes that movies had not dealt with before. It’s often said that jazz is the only truly unique American art form. This is not exactly true. Film noir is a cinematic genre that was created in America, and has been copied elsewhere extensively around the world.

But what is film noir? It’s difficult to define precisely. But when you see it, you recognize it for what it is. It can be a genre, a style, or a motif. It is often confused with the action genre, the thriller genre, and the crime drama. While these types of movies can incorporate noir themes in them, they are not really noir films per se. A proper noir film has to have a certain thematic spirit to it. It needs a certain darkness, a certain heaviness. What matters is the overall “spirit” of the film. What is its message? What impression lingers on the viewer’s brain? All noir films deal with at least a few of the following themes:

Existential crises torment the main character

Self-destructive actions are a compulsive necessity

Alienation from other people in society

Feminine betrayal in one form or another is more or less inevitable

Sexual thrills come with a cost

The impossibility of escaping one’s character or fate

A universe of moral ambiguity, where good often loses to evil

Bad results usually come from good intentions

To see what I mean, see any of the following films: Chinatown, After Dark My Sweet, The Long Goodbye, The Maltese Falcon, The Conversation, Croupier, Memento, The Third Man, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, Le Samourai, Out of the Past, Vertigo. If you’re interested in the genre, you need to check out a few of these classics. There are hundreds of noir films, and these are just a taste.

The “classical period” of film noir straddles the years from 1941 to about 1960. The Maltese Falcon, film scholars tell us, is generally considered to be the first film of the genre. After the 1950s petered out, the art form was put into hibernation in the 1960s and 1970s, only to reappear in the cynical 1990s in the form of “neo-noir.” Neo-noir is still going strong today. There are a great number of them, but some of the best examples are The Spanish Prisoner, The Usual Suspects, Cutter’s Way, Sexy Beast, Road To Perdition, The Pledge, Oldboy, Only God Forgives, La Femme Nikita, Memento…the list goes on and on.

The genre can be traced to the feelings of disillusionment and dislocation that upset American society after the Second World War. The war changed everything, turning conventional morality on its head. Nobody really knew how to cope with the vastly changed landscape that war and social turbulence had created. With the world in chaos, the only safe refuge seemed to be a detached, cynical view of things, as a sort of protective shield.

The mood of the times helped as well. The postwar years, and the Cold War that immediately followed, were characterized by feelings of paranoia, dread, and insecurity. Dark times called for dark themes. Noir films also had the advantage of being relatively cheap to produce. Studios originally shied away from noir, then reluctantly embraced it one they realized that there was a market for it.

Many great Hollywood writers were blacklisted and could only find work by writing apparently shallow cop dramas or crime thrillers. But these same writers managed to embed profound moral ideas in their screenplays. The crime thriller was able to rise above its conventions, and explore territory that it had never explored before.

The French were the first to recognize film noir as a legitimate genre. French critics were deeply impressed by the wave of films coming out of America in the 1940s and 1950s that had dark themes and pessimistic views of the world. And perhaps this is what found a receptive audience in a France that had undergone the serious trauma of the Second World War.

Noir continues to be relevant today because we are dealing with the same themes described above: alienation, being trapped by Fate, moral ambiguity, and the perverse pleasure of self-destructive acts. Every person is forced to grapple with these dark ideas during his life. No one is exempt. And in some strange way, how noir characters deal with their struggles can be inspiring. Many of them have a stoic resolution, and an ironic detachment, which is often the only way to deal with an impossible situation.

Of all the Europeans, it is the French who have embraced it most fervently. Directors like Jean Luc Godard and Jean Pierre Melville, for example, were deeply impressed by American noir and allowed it to influence their own work. Noir has resonance for us today. Its themes harmonize well with the times, I think. If you haven’t seen a few of these movies, you’re missing out.

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11 thoughts on “The Dark Themes Of Film Noir, And Why They Matter Today”

In the last year, I’ve devoured detective noir in particular as well as neo noir, though it is slim pickings as you know.

Two movies struck me in particular.

1. Night Of The Hunter wasn’t just dark, all of the cinematography was dark. The angles were odd.
2. The Man Who Wasn’t There. The Coen brothers actually tried their hand at a noir “tribute” and shot this film in black and white.

I had been listening to series of “modernity” lectures by George Grant who runs a classical school down in Tennessee. The lectures are a bit old now, but one of them dealt with this theme of world weariness which Grant suggested was caused by both the direct effects and aftermath of world war one.

The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, ect were pieces of post world war one literature that reject the principles and ideas of Christian Europe because the results were too painful. He also suggests that world war one is essentially what destroyed Christianity in Europe.

That generation then throws off the old morality, but has nothing to replace it with, hence the the themes you mention that are so prevalent in detective noir.

You might really enjoy a study of noir called “A Girl And A Gun”, written by David N. Meyer. I like “neo-noir” better than the old stuff. “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” and “La Femme Nikita” are examples of this style.

[…] of Kings discussed some life lessons from the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. I’ve written here before about the film noir genre and why I think it has timeless resonance. I hope readers will take the […]

Great post. I was talking with someone about what makes Noir – noir and needed some answers as I couldn’t quite put my ideas into words… I was saying… the protagonists couldn’t trust anyone, make seemingly bad decisions, and don’t come out on top. Your list clarifies this nicely. Thanks!

Yes, these films have aged extremely well. They are perhaps more relevant today than 70 years ago, what with their scepticism about finding grand truths and solutions. “Things, and people, are not what they seem” is their fundamental sentiment. They also capture brilliantly the disempowered male psyche. And the absence of colour, more than made up for by a hypnotic use of shades and shadows, actually enhances the mood and the characters’ sense of foreboding and anguish. Timeless. Spectacular. The very best of film as a medium. We must also give credit to the postwar audiences of cinemagoers, reared on musicals and screwball comedies, for supporting this dark and brooding, non-linear storytelling genre.

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